Insecticide

Lulu.com

The other day my dad sent me a link to Lulu.com.  It's an online publishing site which will sell your book for you, but only print it as and when people need a copy, so you don't need to lay out a ton of cash.  It can even get you onto other online bookshops such as Amazon.

The other cool thing Lulu does is print up copies of your book for a non-exorbitant fee.  If you can get over the idea that you are dipping a toe in the waters of vanity publishing, getting your own book physically made up for £7 each has a few valuable benefits: 

First, if you feel your book is 'finished' (of course, it's never finished) then you might want someone outside the publishing business to read it.  Such people probably don't want 500 pages of single-sided, double-spaced A4.  They might want to read your book in the bath or on a train and would therefore be less than keen to lug such a big pile of ex-tree wherever they go.  So for £7 you can get around this problem and give them an easy book-sized book to read.

Second, you can add your own image designs and cover blurb.  This can have the same effect as a movie trailer, in that it puts the reader in the right frame of mind for the coming tale.  Much better than a big white page with a few words written in Courier or American Typewriter.

Third, you get to see your book as a book.  After all the time it's taken to create the bloody thing, it's quite a pleasant and encouraging experience to see it as it ought to be.  It also helps to judge the way it feels when you pick it up and flick through it.  Does it seem right?  Do the chapters follow one another properly?  Does it have too much white space?  Not enough?  Would you read it if you hadn't written it?  You can now peruse it in a book-reading mind set that might help you judge it better.

For all that, Lulu is relatively inexpensive, and I haven't even mentioned the sad little thrill you get from having a UPS box arrive with your books (I ordered seven) as if you've actually been published.

It's kind of like Diet Coke versus The Real Thing, and it'll do for now.  

Finally finished (until the next piece of advice I agree with).

For the umpteenth time, I now believe Insecticide is properly bloody finished.  

I have taken various bits of advice into account and altered chunks of the book, altered other chunks that altered because of the first alterations and altered the other chunks that required alteration because of the alterations that resulted from the original alterations.

Phew.

Now I can upload it to Authonomy and see if anyone votes for it.  I've also sent it to another friend who has a completely inappropriate agent (he also represents Alan Bennett; I think my oeuvre may fall on stony ground as far as he is concerned) to see what he thinks.  Otherwise, it's back to Writers and Artists and sending it off to agents who didn't have the good fortune of receiving it last month (or was it the month before?).

And now I can get on with the next project, a prospect that I find rather exciting.

I've been alerted to another writing-meets-advertising blog.

Or at least a few posts on that subject within a blog.

Nat and Lol's blog for Campaign is written by a pair of creatives, one of whom is a published novelist.

The bit I've linked to is an interesting section based around an article in Campaign called Go To Work On An Oeuvre, which was about novel-writing copywriters.  

If you do feel the urge to follow my link, do scroll down to the comments for some thoughts on self-publishing and a couple of websites that help that process along.

I'm going to email Lol now and ask if she'll write a post for this blog about how she was published etc.

Back from Holiday...

...to find rejection letters from Aitken Alexander and Conville Walsh.

Ho hum.

I still have a few days of polishing the changes I made to the middle of Insecticide, but then my thoughts will turn to what to do next.

I think the aforementioned screenplay idea Fuck Me Backwards would be the most fun, but I'm currently in the middle of The Rotters Club by Jonathan Coe and it's turning my eye somewhat.  It's a good-but-not-great coming of age story that reminds me of White Teeth but isn't quite up to the same standard.

However, it is a proper book and I can't deny that writing one of those is somewhat tempting.

I've spent the last year apologetically explaining the plot of Insecticide to those that ask about it and I'm not sure I'm quite ready for a year or two of doing the same with FMB.

I'm a firm believer in the idea that you can only write what you can write, and that is a combination of 'can' as in 'have the ability to' and 'can', as in 'all those other things that stoke your enthusiasm to the extent that you can sustain the months and years of writing and rewriting'.  If I don't feel like writing another book that I'm not looking forward to explaining to people, then it seems a bit pointless to start it.

Then again, perhaps I should just follow what enthuses me and not worry about the possible reactions.